The ERE Wheaton Scale

[Western Red Cedar]

otoh there are a huge number of people with jobs like ESL teacher, ski instructor, etc. who never explicitly entered any sort of career path, never got megabucks, have little prospect of megabucks, but have lifetime sustainable jobs with freedom to choose employer and often live how ERE-ers intend to live in retirement from the age of twenty or so right away. Maybe they're not here because we could learn something from them? Either way, a shame that they're not.

This was me for about 5-6 years after college. I'm here . I know from personal experience that it is challenging to sustain that kind of life over multiple decades. For me, it was feeling like I wasn't living up to my potential, so I went back to graduate school in my late 20s. I know other ESL teachers who taught and traveled for more than a decade, but the lack of financial security becomes a problem as you get into your 30s and 40s. The nomadic life can also be challenging for long-term relationships or those wanting to start a family.

[jacob]

Some meta-rules ...

1. The table is just a roadmap showing one common route. The map is NOT the territory. This is not a competition! It's not a cheat sheet for passing a test.
2. The Overton rule: Given the current paradigm, N, +1 is inspiring, +2 is extreme/overdoing it, +3 is insane/going in the completely wrong direction, -1 is lazy, -2 is holding things back, -3 is the sand in the airplane's engine. Or something along those lines.
3. Generally, there's no jumping levels although it's sometimes possible to enter from a side-door.
4. Earlier stages can usually be understood from later stages although the curse of knowledge may apply. (This is how the table is constructed---each new paradigm subsumes the previous.) However, any future stages will always be understood within the paradigm (see column) of the current paradigm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect) Think about this until it sinks in. ("It's impossible to see what you don't recognize yet.") E.g. someone with an accumulation mindset will try to see every single stage above as some kind of accumulation---only variation is how "luxurious"/well-accumulated it is, e.g. quality of restaurants, exoticness of vacations, how many millions, mortgage rate, benefits package. This is even as the N+1 stages are each playing different games.
5. The inability to see beyond the fog on one's current paradigm causes a step-wise form of ascending with long plateaus (years, even decades) as one tries to overcome difficulties by improving the function of one's current paradigm. Most times ascendance to the next stage doesn't happen until one finally realizes that improving the current paradigm/focus doesn't hold the solution to the problem one seeks to solve because that only gets you so far. (E.g. you don't become good at multiplying 8*3 by practicing the speed at which you can go 3, 6, 9, ...24. Multiplication requires breaking out the addition mindset. Similarly addition requires breaking out of the mindset of counting on your fingers when summing things up. Counting really fast is not the answer.)
6. The level of required development or complexity depends on what kinds of problems you want to solve. Maybe you don't want to solve really hard ones. Maybe you really do or at least want to make the attempt. The level required for being on an assembly line is less than being a foreman is less than being a manager is less than being the CEO. More complexity is required for living "well" on $10,000 than is required for living "well" on $50,000 and so on. Most see no reason to attempt the former and so there's no reason for adding more complex perspectives.
7. A stage is not reflective of how good or a bad person you are. Nor does it reflect how "adjusted" you are---it's all work in progress. Rather it's indicative of what kind of perspectives you're capable of holding (any one from N and down) and specifically which one you're focusing on or which one dominates your thinking (typically N, N-1, and N+1 with some individual weighing.
8. Neither does the table say anything about temperament (MBTI et al). Indeed a stage 9 ENFJ will likely be solving different problems (e.g. inventing transition towns) than a stage 9 INTJ (e.g. inventing new meme-delivery systems) but they'll have similar perspectives on their tool set (paradigm).
9. Beware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

[Alphaville]

i've been reading this thread with great frustration and i think the way to cure the undercurrent of nonsense is to try to make this chart more vague rather than more precise.

people get hung up in absurd precisions trying to turn qualitative characteristics into precise numbers. @jacob is trying to stop this i think, but he's still communicating quantitavely which... invites more wuantifying,

once upon a time i had a college minor in mathematics. it was so useless for actual living, i've forgotten almost all of it. math is good... to perform calculations. but really, you can't calculate life.

i ended up going to study literature. which was great, until the eggheads took it over.

the original wheaton table was literally a cartoon. you get a general sense of things from it. it'a bit poetic. it has funny drawings!

but here with these table somehow people have come to think of it either a spreadsheet or some nerdy game where one is supposed to "unlock achievements".

i believe it's supposed to be neither! jeez. the reason smart people sometimes can't think straight is because they get caught in the need to "be smart" all the time. which means: passing exams. shiny numbers! i must chase thee... problems?! i must overanalyze rather than solve...!

i quit the nerd scene when i was in college. nerdiness needs to be tempered with sense.

so, get a sense from the damn table. that's it! the numbers are just a metaphor.

playing fantasy baseball doesn't teach you to play baseball.

just go out there and keep swinging. your stats will take care of themselves.

[daylen]

You can calculate parts of life. Math is more about structure than quantity. Thus if you desire structure in your life then math can be useful once it becomes instinctual enough. The insights must not come directly from math and can develop into a cumulative intuition. There are many possible paths to the acquisition of such an intuition but math/physics seem to be quite efficient/effective at actuating it in a willing agent.

[Alphaville]

You can calculate parts of life.

which parts? let's list them, and make a spreadsheet! then we can discuss who can calculate more parts. then let's brag about it and compete. chop wood, carry water: the bean counter edition.

[daylen]

Alphaville, it appears to me that you use maps to/from math/logic/structure frequently in your communications on this forum. There are direct mappings between how you structure/parse language and the concepts that might eventually be learned from an education in math/physics/linguistics/philosophy/literature (i.e. self taught or otherwise). So, would it be reasonable to presume that there are alternative paths to the internalization of "logic", "math", or "sense making"?

[Qazwer]

Alphaville - I had a long post in mind about how models (math) can some times elucidate reality in certain circumstances but even then functional knowledge might matter - know how vs know that etc - the only way to determine whether in a particular domain one can learn something by reading vs doing is to test it - sometimes it is how it is presented - sometimes it is the nature of the problem etc etc

But I realized a far greater issue - do you honestly think you became less nerdy by going from mathematics to literature? You must have hung out with a far different group of university literature types than I have seen

[Alphaville]

Alphaville, it appears to me that you use maps to/from math/logic/structure frequently in your communications on this forum. There are direct mappings between how you structure/parse language and the concepts that might eventually be learned from an education in math/physics/linguistics/philosophy/literature (i.e. self taught or otherwise).

ok...

So, would it be reasonable to presume that there are alternative paths to the internalization of "logic", "math", or "sense making"?

i don't know what you mean with this question.

but to clarify my stance, and to poorly paraphrase herman hesse's steppenwolf: we're born to live, not to think. this doesn't mean "don't think." it just means to know the limits and applications of kahnemann's system 2. the rest is actual living.

wheaton's original eco-scale is an invitation to a voyage, not a precise descriptor of every instance of every irreducible situation via a formula. sepp holzer-as-yoda is just a symbol.

the ere scale wants to be the same thing i think, but because it's stated in numbers, i believe people are reading it like scores and trying to calculate scores.

we can't reduce all the complexity of infinite situations to a precise chart. the scale can only be... poetic. there is no perfecting the formula, which cannot possibly contain the universe of lived experience.

compare this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... trajectory
to this:
https://youtu.be/Ck5P30zC3Z0

[Alphaville]

But I realized a far greater issue - do you honestly think you became less nerdy by going from mathematics to literature? You must have hung out with a far different group of university literature types than I have seen

nah, like i said, the eggheads ruined poetry. especially at the phd level.

so i dropped out, ran a business, had (minor) adventures, went bust, attempted homesteading, had more (minor) adventures, did more experiments with living, etc.

im not... my mind is never going to stop thinking, and analyzing, etc.

it's just that at some point one has to recognize the limits of system 2 processes and abstraction. one can literally get stuck on it and never leave it for the "real" world.

thinking can be a bit of an addiction.

eta: actually, aa folks claim that it is.

[Qazwer]

it's just that at some point one has to recognize the limits of system 2 processes and abstraction. one can literally get stuck on it and never leave it for the "real" world.

thinking can be a bit of an addiction.

I resemble that comment
But I think you can also take stuff you read and apply it quite quickly - you can read a book on systems thinking and start seeing where to apply those models - you can have a class on economics that goes over how there are multiple forms of capital and see how that can apply to your life and decide to and make sensible changes

I actually think this scale is closer to the live it model than you give it credit for - you need to progress up levels of knowledge - you cannot apply a systems approach to your life until you have looked at how to cut expenses - there is a sense of growth and becoming throughout stages

You cannot have grown up with people or worked with or helped those who lived at a higher level or even believed it when you read about others - until you do it yourself, there is no way you could understand

[Alphaville]

yeah absolutely you can learn and apply models. i'm not against models!

my frustration here is with the thread's (social?) pressure to turn what can't help to be broad paradigms... into precise descriptors where n conditions must be met to achieve level x.

[daylen]

i don't know what you mean with this question.

In other words, you are trying to make sense of it. Does making sense require skill? .. and if so then are there multiple ways to train that skill? .. and if so then could math/calculation be a viable path for some people to take when acquiring the sense-making skill? The main point I was attempting to make was that math/structure/analysis/physics/linguistics/logic/philosophy/literature/etc/etc/etc can all be considered to be coupled together. There are enough similarities that studying any of them can give you(*) a system for sense-making that is often unconsciously at play, allowing you to understand precise language. From a neuroscience perspective, this seems to map to the left hemisphere (i.e. the emissary) and to denotative thought. Yet, as these denotative processes become more instinctual the right hemisphere (i.e. the master) will have more points/information to draw on and thus more gaps to peer into with connotative thought processing (i.e. more general/vague). The key takeaway is that sometimes many points are required for the gaps to become apparent.

(*) That is, allow you to internalize the skill from an unknown unknown to a known unknown to a known known to an unknown known.

[Alphaville]

The key takeaway is that sometimes many points are required for the gaps to become apparent.

if by this you mean that the more mental models of world we have the more can make sense of it intuitively... i would tend to agree (if i read you correctly).

but to these models we also need to add the notion chaos, the noncomputable, the unknowable, the infinite, the unfathomable, the ineffable, etc.

in other words, we need the awareness that our knowledge tools have serious limits--even while we work dilligently to expand them.

we need to know that which we don't know, or can't know. which is... most of the universe (this is a bitter laugh, once upon a very long time i aspired to know.... everything! hahahaha)

anyway, back to the specific case of the ere levels, i don't think they were meant as spreadsheet formulas where one inputs their numbers and the formula throws a score (one's ere level). it's not impossible to come up with some kind of formula--but it's absurd.

the original eco-levels were formulated as a communication/marketing tool. how to "sell" the "customer" appealing ideas that did not seem too far-fetched from their perspective. and for something like that, it's a nice heuristic! but it is by no means hard science.

[daylen]

Na, I am saying that people vary in the number of points they desire. The number of points/gaps changes the flavor of intuition(+), but the processing still seems to take place in the right hemisphere(*). There are plenty of gaps to fill. This is impossible to do with points yet we insist on doing it continuously.

Deja Vu?

(+) Ne: many small gaps, Ni: few large gaps

(*) Intuition can be modeled as connotative perception.

[Alphaville]

ah.

but the problem seems to be (and i see @jacob explaining and reexplaining not to do this) people are getting hung up on the "points" as a kind of scoreboard or a game system or a morality chart, rather than grasping the... gestalt,

hence... remove all the columns and use cartoons instead

(but seriously... more columns invite more columns, more numbers invite more numbers, more precisions invite more outliers, etc)

[daylen]

It seems to me that everyone has more or less the same capacity for storing points. That is, cortical columns are like pointers to "actuators" or subject/object relations (e.g. vision, audition, movement, etc.) and to each other. The way that these pointers connect to each other depends upon where they are in the brain topology. It is as if you can only zoom your attention in/out a limited amount. If you zoom in to the taste of food then you are necessarily giving up some ability to zoom into math or water polo or whatever. So basically pick your poison/medicine. On the other hand, zooming in is itself an acquired skill.

[IlliniDave]

but the problem seems to be (and i see @jacob explaining and reexplaining not to do this) people are getting hung up on the "points" as a kind of scoreboard or a game system or a morality chart, rather than grasping the... gestalt,

hence... remove all the columns and use cartoons instead

To me the Wheaton Scale seems pretty contained in scope which I think makes it more digestible. Plus, like you said, it's a cartoon, and it more/less tells a story. The ereWL summary seems broader in scope.

One of the challenges with a table format is that a reader (reasonably) looks for correlation across rows as well as down columns. I'd guess many of us (certainly me) self-assess at significantly different levels across the columns.

I think for some of us the mapped progression down some of the columns doesn't reflect our personal evolution. Just as an example, the vacation/activity column is one I have a lot of trouble identifying with.

So my table consuming mechanism produces an array of scores with one of the allowed values being N/A. I dunno what to do with the array other than to mentally file it away as a curio.

If I'm understanding jacob correctly it's a path rather than the path. I'm not into permaculture myself, but I suspect someone could find blueprints to get a pretty good jump on the process. The breadth of ere means, to borrow a common phrase from bogleheads.org, "Many roads lead to Dublin."

Maybe a good activity for those who's skin the ereWL table has gotten under would be to make a personalized version of it (whatever rows and columns you want). Going from your zero point to your today point and trying to understand what happened under the hood might a) give you better understanding/context of the global ereWL table as well as suggest a road map that's meaningful to you. Or, you can file the whole subject away as a curio. Chances are your subconscious will chew on it and if you open the curio cabinet one day down the road you might have an aha moment that unlocks another piece of the puzzle.

A big part of my past job responsibilities was to be sort of a translator between people who wallowed neck deep in all the technical details all the time and those a step or two or three higher in the management chain. The latter often being intelligent and highly competent people, just in a position where they have to look from the outside in rather than the inside out. So I totally get the instinct of wanting to see a clear, distinct takeaway. I think there's just to much breadth in scope.

[7Wannabe5]

I was always way better at math theory than math practice. So, even though I comprehend Level 8 to the extent that I would like “head/poll taxes” to be generalized to something more like “boundary maintenance expenses”, I am fairly certain that an individual who is obsessed with lowering her “boundary maintenance expenses” so that she has more room in her budget for candy, arts and crafts supplies, and musical theater tickets, is nowhere near Level 8 functioning

[BookLoverL]

If I've come across at any point as being overly focused on the exact columns personally - then I didn't mean to. I've always seen the table as sort of fungible.

The focus column has clearly always been the main column, because that's the one that describes the thought patterns. Every other column is merely a list of examples of ways one might, potentially, act at that level, as far as I can see. And of course there are the people such as the permaculture people who are taking a different route up the mountain, or potentially climbing a different mountain all together.

You could be living any sort of lifestyle at all and if the underlying thought pattern matches then that level's the best fit, because even if you personally have made different choices than typical, your thought pattern is going to come out in every action you take in your life - when you're at work, when you're on vacation, when you're at home, when you're travelling, in your love life, everywhere. But based on interaction of thought pattern with your local circumstances, and also on personality factors such as what types of things you actually enjoy, then a different way of living would emerge for each individual person.

I also have a maths degree - a good maths degree, even! - but I don't really like calculating and tracking stuff. I prefer to make a model projection a couple of times a year. Really I'm a poet at heart and prefer to think about things on a metaphorical level. And I think that if you come to the table from that perspective, rather from than a perspective that likes to analyse every little detail, it's easy to see the table as a sort of metaphorical route through the fog of life. You don't have to be limited by one column not matching.

[Alphaville]

To me the Wheaton Scale seems pretty contained in scope which I think makes it more digestible. Plus, like you said, it's a cartoon, and it more/less tells a story. The ereWL summary seems broader in scope.

yeah. i was looking at the eco-scale last night and it actually has a lot of information. but it has a specific goal of reducing one's ecological impact by certain specified behaviors. so it is a progression towards "holzerhood."

the same information in table format without the cartoons would invite a different response.

One of the challenges with a table format is that a reader (reasonably) looks for correlation across rows as well as down columns. I'd guess many of us (certainly me) self-assess at significantly different levels across the columns.

yeah, same here. i'm level-indeterminate if i try to place myself on it. some high, some low, some medium. i'm okay with that though. i'm not looking for instructions, validation, belonging, or comparison.

I think for some of us the mapped progression down some of the columns doesn't reflect our personal evolution. Just as an example, the vacation/activity column is one I have a lot of trouble identifying with.

hahahaha yes. that is the one that makes least sense to me. traveling around in a diy van sounds like torment. in the old days i used to hitchike or hop on a bus: that was fun.

So my table consuming mechanism produces an array of scores with one of the allowed values being N/A. I dunno what to do with the array other than to mentally file it away as a curio

yes. same here--and i actually have no problem with that.

but i think the general thrust of evolving towards becoming "postconsumer" is the important part that gets lost in the curio status.

i think that necessary and sufficient idea needs to be rescued from the rube goldberg.

it's in the title, but then it gets buried.

A big part of my past job responsibilities was to be sort of a translator between people who wallowed neck deep in all the technical details all the time and those a step or two or three higher in the management chain. The latter often being intelligent and highly competent people, just in a position where they have to look from the outside in rather than the inside out. So I totally get the instinct of wanting to see a clear, distinct takeaway. I think there's just to much breadth in scope.

the executive summary, yeah.

but here i don't think it's difficult to synthesize the whole of the thing towards a postconsumer ideal.

the problem as i see it occurs when we presume that we'll find a hard solution by adding more details and tweaking them further.